Conroy’s characters are well-worn stencils, like the sexy, snooty rich girl (Estella meets Daisy Buchanan) and the gluttonous Italian violin virtuoso (Paganini meets Zorba meets the cartoon chef on a pizza box), surrounding a cipher: Claude himself. Despite his upbringing (no father, loony cab-driving mother), Claude has no eccentricities; his rise occasions none of the guilty snobbism that gives Dickens’s Pip esthetic interest. Claude’s fairy-godfather mentors never turn weird, he never blows a big audition, he gets women into bed with no problems except for the embarrassingly rhapsodic prose in the sex scenes. In short, there’s hardly a moment of tension in the novel. True, Claude has a crisis after his marriage ends and his principal mentor dies, but he’s OK again as soon as he reads in the man’s will that he considered Claude his “spiritual son”–something we’d figured out a few hundred pages earlier. “Body & Soul” has both the improbability and the predictability of a pop best seller; from Conroy that’s the last thing we would have predicted.
